Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday May 23, 2005 @09:58PM
from the protect-yourself-at-all-times dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A family in Sacromento has covered the side of their house with aluminum to keep the radiowaves from their neighbors at bay. The city has given them one week to remove the life saving shielding or face charges."

I'm from Ventura, and am unsure exactly where "Sacromento" is, but I'm glad I moved to Alaska as soon as I turned 18. I could build a house out of aluminum foil ('tin' foil is hard to come by) in my neighborhood, and no one would care, even though the cheapest house just sold for $275,000. Of course, I don't live in Los Anchorage, but I still have DSL, indoor plumbing, and a fire department 6 blocks away.

Yes, it's a hard life. Not paying state income taxes or purchase taxes, getting a check from the Permanent Fund every year for approx. $1,000, having all this fresh air and clean water and room to roam. Then there's the gold mine that I own. What a hassle it is to throw back the small gold so it can grow bigger. Heck, I remember once, when it got to -20 below zero for a couple of days. I had to drive almost an hour to find good skiing.

Different strokes.Some people would rather have good schools, a community, clean air, clean water, and a large amount of freedom.Others think that having a selection of 20 good Chinese restaurants they can call at 2:00 am for take out is more important.

i will say that the people with the tin foil home are NUTS!If they REALLY believe that they are getting bombarded then just use a grounded fine metal screen. The could put it on the inside of there home and Spackle and paint over it! Oh wait the paint will probably cause there hair to fall out and their nipples to invert. Chemicals you know.They should not worry. I have informed my bosses at project Majestic to shift from microwaves to ELF so their shielding is now useless. Thank goodness HARP is on line now to deal with trouble makers like this.

Yes, it's a community code. It means the community got together and a majority decided that they wanted to live in an area with certain rules. Nobody is forced to live in the community and that same community can act to modify those codes whenever they please.

This has nothing to do with race, national pride, or an unchecked autocracy. Therefore, the fascism label simply doesn't apply. I suggest you learn the meaning of a word before you start throwing it around.

It means the community got together and a majority decided that they wanted to live in an area with certain rules.

Awww - they're so cute when they're young and idealistic, aren't they?

These days, rules aren't decided by the majority. Rules (laws) are passed in order to pacify small groups who are very adept at making a lot of noise and attracting attention to themselves and their cause. The majority of people just want everyone else to leave them alone.

From the article it looks like the building codes prohibit it. Maybe they should look at getting sheet metal siding - as long as its installed correctly and doesn't violate any of the neighborhood covenants they'd probably be ok.

Because it's a housing code violation. It looks from the picture like it's touching the fence/house next door and in CA (at least in Sac, I live there) it's illegal to build or have any structure connected to your house touching or within x amount of feet of the fence. Our neighbours behind us built some rickity lean-to on their house which used our back fence as one of the walls and we called the housing code people who came and told them to tear it down.

This site [joespc.com] is a great true example of what happens when your neighbors go crazy. In this case, it's a family of rednecks. It's a great laugh from the burnt down back yard to the child sized children pools.

I guess we slashdotted his poor site... I've attached the copy below... check out the site once he get's it back... the pictures are just hilarious. I pulled the links from the copy to save his server.

------

In
case you're wondering, this Web page is about my next-door neighbors.
Since my neighbors have been driving me crazy and no amount of civilized
reasoning and/or negotiations have worked -
I have decided to dedicate a small corner of cyber-space to them.

My
family and friends are constantly asking me to tell them the "latest"
thing my neighbor has done so this page will save me from repeating myself.
Besides, I thought it would be fun. Everything you read here is
entirely true, that's what makes it so funny. Enjoy!

Background:

My neighbors moved into
the house next to ours in October 1997. It's a brand new neighborhood
with new houses. Everyone's house
looks beautiful but that's about to change.
The new neighbors seem like normal people until shortly after they move
in (more later).

First, let me say that my
redneck neighbor is not destitute or under-privileged. The guy owns a business, drives VERY nice new cars, he just
doesn't care about his house. In
order to protect the ignorant, we'll call him John Doe # 8 or JD8 for short.

October 1997 -
They are here!

Well, it should have been
a sign of things to come but my neighbors move into their brand new house.
Inventory: 1 artificial Christmas tree, clothes, stereo system, TV, no
furniture). The Christmas tree is nicely decorated (remember, it's
October). We can tell what the tree looks like because the windows have no
miniblinds so at night, you can see right into the house as you drive up.
They have also decided to wrap some strands of Christmas lights around their
front porch railing. I guess there's no electric outlet nearby because
they never turn these lights on.

October 1997 - 1st
Home beautification project

It's dark outside, I'm
standing in front of my house and my neighbor does the following: He gets in his car, drives
it up to the house on the other side of my house (this house is still being
built). He backs his car up to the construction site and opens the trunk.
He calmly proceeds to load up the trunk with bricks and 2x4s. Pretty
clever, huh?

The following night, at
around 9:00pm he decides it's time to build a mailbox post. It's very
nice. He used the stolen 2x4s from the previous night. It looks like
it's made out of 2x4s except he didn't steal any that were long enough so he
nails a couple of them together to get the correct height - I mean, it has to
look just right! The mailbox post is not very sturdy so he braces it with
an additional 2x4 (at an angle). Click
here to see the mailbox (no bracing 2x4 though).

He uses the bricks as
edging for his flower beds. They look nice. Especially with the
newly planted bamboo trees and the ten gallon fish tank (no fish, just water).

November 1997 -
The fence!

I wake up to my wife
telling me, "Hey, it looks like JD8 is working on a fence".
Well I don't think much of it until she tells me that he's trying to
build a fence around the entire house (front and back) and that the fence is
going to be chain-link. We have some "covenant rules" that
prohibit you from putting up a silver chain-link fence. Also, you cannot
have any fence go past the back of your house. By now, I am freaking out.
I can see the property value falling faster than his mailbox post.

Anyway, I get to work and
at 9:01AM I call our builder. I explain the situation to him and he
agrees to pay JD8 a visit before the concrete around the metal posts dries.
Sure enough, I get home after work and the posts around the front of the house
are laying on the street. Not exactly what I expected but at least they're
out of the ground. Tra

Absolutely. Any time you're having a problem with your neigbor make sure you talk to him/her first. Not only is it the polite thing to do, you have the ethical responsibilty to go to your friend/opponent before seeking legal protection.

If the fence is really important to him you might be able to work out a deal to your own financial gain. Keeping communication open will require that you respect your neighbors directly.

With more and more people putting in things like Home Theater Rooms (where having natural light comming in is actually undesirable), how come polititians and regulators wont change the building codes to allow you to have rooms without natural light?

I agree. If it's their property let them be protected from the aliens. Who cares. And don't give me crap about it looking nice for the neighbors. I believe in freedom. If my neighbors want to paint their house with pink polka-dots then so be it, none of my buisness. People spend far too much energy worrying about what other people are doing. The officials should worry about stuff that is actually harming others.

I agree that there's far too many silly rules about houses (damn HOA's), but there are construction standards for a reason. Some of this crap blows off and hits a neighors house, or a neighbor, and I think there will be a few problems.

Not only are you not a Californian, but you've obviously never owned a house -- or owned one that was worth so little, you didn't obssess over things that might affect the value of your property. In most of urban California, you have to sell your soul in order to afford a house -- which makes people insanely aware of anything that might lower property values. People will hassle you just for parking a rusty car in front of your house.
And of coursethey pass zoning laws that minimize any and all activities affecting same. So forget about raising chickens in your back yard, or painting your house a funny color. And you damn well better take good care of your lawn, if you value your freedom!

In that context, a strong reaction to a house covered with metal foil is most predictable. The only suprise is that the neighbors took the time to call the code enforcement people, instead of rounding up a lynch mob!

If your situation is any better, don't feel too smug. Housing costs are going up everywhere, and the same obsesssion with property values is spreading like a disease.

Unless the covenent of your deed prohibits it, or you're a member of a HOA; you can tell your neighbors to mind their own damned business.

Absolutely incorrect. Every municpality in the US has building codes and zoning restrictions, many also have any number of civil and/or criminal codes, all of which limit what you may or may not do with or on your property.

I bought a house, it was average for the part of Pennsylvania that I'm from. It's in an upper-middle class neighborhood.

Any other state and they'd merely be shunned by their neighbors and harrassed by annoying teenagers.

Where the hell do you live? I want to move there so I can quit being harassed by my homeowners' association for having my antenna in the "wrong place". It was "hurting the value of their investment", not that the mandated ugly gray and brown houses are all that great anyway.

Anywhere where there are no associations has to be a better place to live than here, even if the house isn't a "great investment" without a bunch of old biddies who take hundreds of dollars of my money then can't even afford to pay a bored neighborhood kid $20 to mow the yard for the old woman down the street that they've been harassing as well.

Actually you can get insulation boards, such as Tuf-R, which are basically styrofoam or something similar with an aluminum foil skin, designed to be nailed directly to the outside of the wall studs before the siding goes on. As of several years ago they were looking into connecting the aluminum skin together, electrically speaking, and tieing it all to a grounding system to create a "Faraday cage" type shield.

The walls on some types of single family homes are not very strong at all by themselves. Codes are different for every area but a normal wall on a split foyer home from the inside out consists of paint, 3/8 or 1/2 inch drywall, fiberglass insulation to fill the area between the 2x4's, a moisture barrier/foam insulation (like you described above) and then vinyl siding. Notice the absense of wood sheets? Some homes have a 2 4'x8' sheets of wood added on the corners for stabilty but some designs apparently d

Seriously, space blankets work great to keep out the day star. I put one on a couple of windows last year, and went most of the summer without air conditioning. I'd bet it was 10 degrees cooler than without.

Those window films you buy at Home Depot are mostly the same stuff, but with a huge markup. And, though you can still kind of see through a space blanket, they block much more light than any of the commercial films.

It's probably not economical to re-apply film every summer and remove it for the wint

Jests aside, those Mylar "space blankets" really do work. A few years ago a friend and I were climbing Ben Nevis [ihug.co.nz] in December in a [failed] attempt at some winter mountaineering. To make a long story short, our shitty mountaineering-club tent leaked through the top and bottom and we spent a very long (13-hour) night laying awake in 2 inches of water on the side of the mountain.

Putting one of those Mylar blankets inside of my sleeping bag was the dif

I mean yeah, you could concievably rig your grow-room up with mylar over the walls, but is it really going to help that much more than the white plastic sheeting used by most of the grow-rooms I've seen?

Are you seriously suggesting that every hiker or camper who buys a space blanket in the US is going to get reported to the DEA? I don't live in the US, but if so, that is so ridiculous, so utterly pointless, so far out of control, that I'm just kind of staggered.

No, unfotunately I am not joking. Many of the stores that sell garden lights openly tell you they share their customer list with law enforcement, a few of them have signs on the door. The police used to tail people who would go to the garden center and pull them over...etc That behavior got it institutionalized here, so they got the hardware stores involved and started offering cash to employees who would phone in on larger orders of certain supplies. Buying a mess of mylar at the hardware store is enough. Buying a single space age blanket probably isn't going to raise an eyebrow though.

I'm not sure how much better the mylar is for that purpose, I've been told that it reflects different spectrums of light more effectively than just flat white paint, and slightly more effectively (total lumens) than the plastic sheeting. The plastic sheeting is lot cheaper.

Of course just because they come to your door doesn't mean you have to let them in, but the mere fact that they are at the door because you made a purchase from the hardware store is very disturbing.

Well, I do not know about the specifics of this family's circumstances, but I know what exists for me.

At the far corner of the property next door to me is a HUGE cell phone tower. When I worked on any electronics in my home lab - analog or digital - I used to have problems with high levels of RF that clearly reduced noise margins in the circuitry. Crude experiments with a high frequency probe and antenna showed that the tower seemed to have a nice fat lobe pumping stuff in my direction. Then I began to wond

Remember...you're looking for a rational solution to a whackjob problem.

Yep, this is the a classic case of trying to fight irrationality with logic. The classic example is the apocryphal story of the med student working in a psych ward trying to cure a delusional man with reason. The man was under the delusion that he was dead.
"So you're dead," says the med student."Yes indeed," says the man, "I've been dead for nearly ten years."
"OK then, do dead people bleed?" the med student asks.
"Don't be absurd," replies the man, "of course dead people don't bleed."
So the med student grabs the man's hand, and jabs the mans thumb with a pin, which then begins to bleed.
"Well what do you know!" exclaims the man, staring in wide-eyed amazement at the drop of blood welling up on his thumb, "Dead people do bleed!"

I'm sure there will be plenty of Tinfoil Hat Jokes and other posts, but after reading the article I'd say they need lithium, not aluminum. That is to say, the "radio waves" deal is typical in schizophrenic patients. Other common variations are people using radio waves to listen to what their thinking, people using high-tech devices to spy on their homes. The end result is a bunch of variations on the sheet metal siding. Those people that aren't familiar with metal and radiation commonly use cardboard boxes to cover all openings and windows.

A misdemeanor charge isn't what's needed, a visit from a social worker probably is. There's a difference between being unique and unusual, and having mental issues.

A neighbour of my parents did this as he slowly slipped further into insanity. When I lived at home, he was a normal guy with a job. I never met him, but he never did anything that would indicate there was anything wrong. However a couple years later it started. He became a reculse, lost his job, began screaming at imaginary things at all hours of the night. He worse an AFDB, coated all his windows in aluminium foil and so on.

The neighbours wanted to have him comitted for his own good, but you can't do tha

I knew this guy who was given millions and a large shareholding in a public company by his father. He had to play by his father's (and stepmother's) rules which he wasn't doing and he seemed to think it was funny to aggravate them. So they hired some spooks to follow him and eavesdrop on him. He was never the sharpest knife in the draw and years of ADD drugs didn't help. So when he started getting paranoid and having "dellusional fantasies" about people spying on him and his house - which they were actually doing - this was the proof used to incarcerate him in a mental institution. Last time I saw him he was on drugs that had completely extinguished his mind. I am sure people much more qualified than I would testify that he was really schizophrenic (and they did when he was incarcerated) but its pretty sad that the proof of someone's psychosis can be engineered by simply spying on them and then telling them that they are paranoid - how do I know he was being spied on? His stepmother warned me off and offered photos showing that I had also been under observation.

Obviously someone putting tin foil all over their house is a fair indication that their mental state should be questioned. But malicious people can (and do) take advantage of the common perception that paranoia about being spied on is proof positive of schizophrenia for the own nefarious purposes. Never underestimate how mean spirited and avaricious some people are.

A misdemeanor charge isn't what's needed, a visit from a social worker probably is.

How about just leaving them the hell alone and minding your own god damn business? Am I the only one here who respects freedom more than arbitrary "social standards" imposed by some central planning agency?

Build a parabolic dish and steer it until the "radiation" is reflected away from the house. If it is real, it'll be focussed on the perp, who will either suffer horribly or be turned into a giant green monster. Either way, they'll stop being a problem.

If, however, there is no radiation hazard, then nobody is affected and it's no more of an eyesore than all of the other satellite dishes out there.

Now, there are known places where radio leakage from assorted sources has caused problems. There was a metal stadium in the Middle East - forget exactly where - where, whilst it was under construction, power tools would turn themselves on and huge arcs could be seen. Turned out that the stadium acted as a gigantic radio dish and was not only receiving signals from powerful radio sources, but was focussing them too.

There have also been known cancer spikes in areas with (a) high humidity and (b) badly-maintained, sparking power lines. It is not yet proven that there is a causal relationship, but nobody has convincingly ruled it out, either.

This particular case, though, smacks heavily of a family being traumatized by George Bush's "War on Terror" (Sept. 11th, in and of itself, was really a fairly negligable event - ten times that number die each year in car accidents in the US, and more than a thousand times that number are currently in prison in the US for violent crimes).

Personally, I think the city should come to an agreement with the family. The family takes down the aluminum, agrees that the problem probably isn't real, but agrees to work with the city to sue the Federal Government for psychological damage to cover the expenses incurred and the treatment needed to deal with the PTSD the family has suffered with, because of GWB's attitudes.

Couldn't they have put up regular aluminum siding? The construction grade siding is fairly thick and complies with building codes. It's also paintable. The neighbors would never know it was there once it was on.

Too bad the NSA's engineering manuals are classified. They specialize in that type of construction. Nothing gets out. Nothing gets in. It still looks like a normal building, although the windows look somewhat unusual.

D'Souza family. Obviously culturally acclimated as their house is not garishly painted behind the metal sheets (I saw some detailed photos on a live TeeVee newscast) is nutzo. The whol efriggin family.

OR

OR

OR

There is a single, LONE NUT, in their neighborhood who coupled the magnetron from his microwave oven to an antenna and is actually tossing photons at the D'Souzas.

Seriously guys, which is more believable? It's California after all. Personally, you couldn't pay me enough to live in any city in that state.

The D'Souzas said the bombardment began after the first anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that the radio waves have caused them health problems ranging from headaches to lupus.

As someone who has a family member with Lupus, I call absolute bullshit on this.

Lupus causes haven't really been figured out. Furthermore, there's absolutely ZERO medical evidence that EMF/EMI causes or even aggravates Lupus. Trust me, I looked and looked after her doctor told her to "avoid cell phones and wireless devices whenever possible". I even emailed two mailing lists- one for researchers, one for patients- and came up with nothing. Nobody had ever heard of this. Furthermore, if their theory wer correct, we'd be seeing an explosion of Lupus cases (we haven't).

The D'Souzas said they will comply with the order and remove the sheet metal, but they also plan to gather evidence to show city officials what they believe is a problem with radiation.

That will be pretty tough, given there's next to no evidence EMF/EMI causes anything in people, and a lot of studies showing it has no discernible effects.

The inside of the house is also covered with foil and the beds are covered with a foil-like material as well,"

Sounds to me like they'd be a lot better served spending their money on a psychologist, not tin foil. Self-diagnosis ("radio waves are making us depressed, and giving us Lupus!") is a textbook sign of a hypochondriac.

There's plenty, but the intensity has to be high. There were a large number of birth defects reported from pregnant women operating PVC welders in the 1970s (almost 100% in one plant, the pregnant women were given the "warm" machines to use in the winter, the bodies of the operators were heated up by induction), which is why more care is taken now to ensure that the sheilding is in good shape. EMF from a lot of sources obeys the least squares

"The D'Souzas said the bombardment began after the first anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks"

There's an interesting, if not well defined, link between trauma and psychosis. Delusions and paranoia seem to have a strong link to widely shared public "concerns". I recently talked with a psychiatrist about paraniod schizophrenics and mentioned that there seemed to be a recurring theme of religious delusion and persecution. He, in return, said that in the 50's, paranoid schizophrenics, frequently complained of persecution by communists. The bogey man of the day seems to morph readily into paranoid delusions.

On a less humane note, it's scary these people are procreating, but just to help things along this site [mindjustice.org] should validate their paranoia.

the only way property values should have bering and a persons rights is when DIRECT damage is being done. for instances:1)you are burning your house and you catch your neighbors house of fire! or less extreme, the odor/smoke is drifting onto their property.2)you have weeds, your weeds are spreading to your neighbors property.3)anything else not along these lines, go F'ING LUCK!!!!

Some years ago, I started hearing music on my phone, even when no call was in progress.

Of course, I just waited for station identification and found out which AM station I was getting. It turned out that the 50KW AM station nearby [theslowlane.com] away had one of their three towers collapse in the 1989 California earthquake. Until they replaced it, their output pattern was distorted.
I was in a really strong lobe.

Adding a small bypass cap across the phone line helped the problem.
But it took more filtering to completely cure it.
I had to have the telco guys add some filtering on their side of the demark. And, years later, when I got DSL, that had to come out. Huge hassle. Three telco visits with test gear to get DSL working properly.

I'm sorry. They might be as crazy as SCO but private property is private property.

If the neighbors or the city really has something to gain with their house looking good they should either offer to pay for more attractive tin foil or offer to buy their house from them. Forcing a private property owner to decorate their home a certain way at gunpoint is not part of a free society.

When you buy a home, you're agreeing to abide by the rules in that location that pertain to home ownership. Some such rules are just common sense, like requiring a permit to dig around underground where the utility lines are. Some of them are excessively onerous, like Homeowners' Association bylaws. The rules in this case seem to fall somewhere in between.

On the other hand, try being the one _propagating_ the radio waves. Flight path restrictions exempted, amateur radio operators have a federal license to a 100 foot tower and 1000 watts output. Happy homeowners' meeting announcing that.

But they don't have the right to put up whatever they want. Especially if they have neighbors. You see, if the town becomes ugly, then the value of their property diminishes. It's kinda like me going over to some kids house and spilling kool-aid on his super rare comic book.

+2 Informative? Spilling cool-aide on some kids rare comic book has nothing to do with this situation. This would be more like taking your crappy comics and putting them next to his nice ones. Sure, it may not look nice, but the ACTUAL value and quality of his comics are not affected in any way. As soon as you take your nasty comics away his look nicer again. In order for your analogy to be correct, these foil people would have had to put the sheet metal on their neighbors house instead of their own.

Obviously you've failed to understand that the police are in on it as well. Every cop car is equipped with a mobile RF transmitter. So if they called in the cops then they're only going to increase their exposure to the killer death rays.

Yeah because gods forbid anyone who owns property or a home should be allowed to do as they please with it just because they own it. They must be forced to conform with government approved standards. If they can't handle that then perhaps some time in Siberia will teach them a lesson. If they offend a second time then the neighbors should be allowed to lynch them.

But only neighbors who are party members in good standing.

Who are these assholes who insist on acting like individuals anyway? Fucking Americans.

Um... those satellite images on Google maps are not real time. I found our house, and the house that we used to live in is only a few blocks away. We sold it to a guy who subdivided the lot and built a house in the back yard. The house was completed over three years ago, but there is no sign of it on the Google satellite images.